Abstract The present study examined how healthy aging and aphasia influence the capacity for readers to generate structural predictions during online reading, and how animacy cues influence this process. Non-brain-damaged younger (n = 24) and older (n = 12) adults (Experiment 1) and individuals with aphasia (IWA; n = 11; Experiment 2) read subject relative and object relative sentences in an eye-tracking experiment. Half of the sentences included animate sentential subjects, and the other half included inanimate sentential subjects. All three groups used animacy information to mitigate effects of syntactic complexity. These effects were greater in older than younger adults. IWA were sensitive to structural frequency, with longer reading times for object relative than subject relative sentences. As in previous work, effects of structural complexity did not emerge on IWA's first pass through the sentence, but were observed when IWA reread critical segments of the sentences. Thus, IWA may adopt atypical reading strategies when they encounter low frequency or complex sentence structures, but they are able to use animacy information to reduce the processing disruptions associated with these structures.

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活跃度和句子类型对失语症默读理解的影响：眼动追踪研究

摘要 本研究探讨了健康老龄化和失语如何影响读者在在线阅读期间生成结构预测的能力，以及活力线索如何影响这一过程。未脑损伤的年轻 (n = 24) 和年长 (n = 12) 成年人（实验 1）和失语症患者（IWA；n = 11；实验 2）在眼动追踪实验中阅读主体相关和客体相关句子. 一半的句子包括有生命的句子主题，另一半包括无生命的句子主题。所有三个小组都使用动态信息来减轻句法复杂性的影响。这些影响在老年人中比年轻人更大。IWA 对结构频率很敏感，对象相对句子的阅读时间比主题相对句子的阅读时间长。和之前的作品一样，结构复杂性的影响并没有出现在 IWA 第一次通过句子时，但在 IWA 重读句子的关键部分时观察到。因此，IWA 在遇到低频或复杂的句子结构时可能会采用非典型的阅读策略，但他们能够使用活力信息来减少与这些结构相关的处理中断。